ONE BODY, THREE BURIALS

For almost 20 years, Venda and Dennis Hunter’s three daughters – Deborah, Dianne, and Jennifer – thought their mother had left them in the middle of the night; they thought she had driven away with a man they had never met.

Their brother, David, thought that too, but he never got the chance to find out what really happened. In another sad twist to the Hunter family tragedy, when David was 16 – five years after his mother apparently ran away on a rainy night in October 1981 – he was stabbed to death on Melbourne’s bayside St Kilda beach.

In 2002, 33-year-old Deborah vividly remembered as a 13-year-old waking up and, with 11-year-old David, looking in vain for her mother. Nine-year-old Dianne was away at school camp, and Deborah and David did not know that two-year-old Jennifer had already found out their mother was not there.

Deborah: My brother and I woke up and we couldn’t find Mum, so we went looking for her in the washhouse because she was normally in there washing clothes or she was outside hanging clothes on the washing line … We asked Dad where she was, and he just said that she left during the night … that she had gone with another man in a car during the night.

As a 30-year-old, Dianne remembered returning from school camp and having to wait for hours with a teacher because her parents had not turned up. Eventually, she got a lift home with a classmate’s parents.

Dianne: When I walked inside, Dad was on the couch, crying with his head in his hands and I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure … He told me that mum had left us that she had taken off with somebody else … After he told me, I didn’t believe him, and then he told me that, well, she was gone and, ‘Go and have a look in her cupboards,’ and I went and had a look and I saw some of her clothes had been taken and some of her possessions weren’t there as well … He said it happened during the night. He was woken up by a car and then by the time he got up and looked out the window, a car was taking off.

Dennis Hunter told a neighbour of their Furlonger Street home, in the industrial Victorian town of Traralgon, that his wife had ‘shot through with her boyfriend and will never come back’. The day his mother disappeared, David phoned one of her best friends, Yvonne Gentle, to tell her. He passed the phone to his father.

Ms Gentle: He said that they had a fight, that he had gone to bed and that Venda had got up and rang somebody she knew, that she had gone off with this guy in the middle of the night and that he heard the car doors bang … I asked him … ‘Did she take her car? And he said: ‘No’. I asked him if she took her handbag … She didn’t even take her handbag … I asked him about Jenny … I was just so shocked because I couldn’t believe that she could go anywhere without Jenny … or her car, or her handbag.

Dennis Hunter also explained Venda’s disappearance to her professional soldier brother John Holtman.

Mr Holtman: A rainy night, nonidentified motor vehicle, Venda barely said any words, went out into the rainy night, into the unidentified motor vehicle with a strange man, and drove off into oblivion…

I was told by Dennis that $12,000 had been whipped out of the bank accounts of the children very close to the time that Venda disappeared … He claimed that Venda had taken it when she left.

Years later, Hunter explained his first wife’s disappearance to his de facto wife, Frances Medley.

Ms Medley: He said that there was an argument and he went to bed … He got up at three o’ clock in the morning when he heard car doors slam and went out and he saw the car take off.

That wasn’t all. According to her husband, Venda Hunter made several mysterious reappearances after walking out on her family.

A short time after that wet October night in 1981, while Dennis Hunter was driving Dianne in a nearby town, he told her he had just seen her mother drive by. He asked her if she had seen her too. Dianne hadn’t. About three years later, when the children returned from a day-long picnic to the picturesque country Victorian town of Walhalla with their stepmother, Hunter told them their runaway mother had visited.

Deborah: Dad said Mum had been and we had just missed her … She’d come to see us kids.

Dianne: He said they had got into an argument because she wanted to come and collect us kids … and Mum had hopped into the car and taken off and … Dad had hopped into his car and followed them.

The saddest sighting Dennis Hunter reported of his wife was in 1986. He said she was seen at the gate of the cemetery when David was being buried.

All of it was nonsense. For almost 20 years, Dennis Hunter lied to hide a terrible secret.

Persistent questioning by Venda’s brother, lingering suspicions of others, a renewed missing persons investigation after Venda inherited some money and inquiries by the police department’s new cold case unit eventually led to police arresting Hunter in May 2001 and charging him with murdering his wife 19½ years earlier.

He quickly confessed.

Hunter told police he had killed Venda by hitting her two or three times with a stick at about two or three o’ clock one morning in October 1981. He couldn’t remember the exact date, describe the stick, or say where he had got it from. He also wasn’t sure whether he had bashed Venda in the lounge or in the hallway.

Hunter: I just hit her with whatever – I can’t remember what – was near me at the time, just killed her … It just happened so fast…

Police: How hard did you hit her?

Hunter: Must have been enough to have killed her and the blood to have come out.

Police: A fair bit of blood?

Hunter: Yeah … Just bloody went down like a bag of spuds…

Police: Where did you hit her?

Hunter: Her head, I think … two or three times…

Police: When did you know she was dead?

Hunter: When she started bleeding and I started freaking. I didn’t know what to do … I think I rolled her up in something … a quilt, a blanket or a sheet, I can’t remember … I carried her to the back door, put her in a wheelbarrow, I think … That’s how I done it. I put her in the shed … then I cleaned up the mess and went back to bed. I woke up about six or seven, or something like that.

Hunter said he hadn’t planned on telling his children anything but then two-year-old Jennifer toddled through, wanting to see her mother.

Hunter: Young Jenny … She just wanted to know where Mum was, and I said she was in bed asleep. I said, ‘Don’t go in there, Mummy’s had a hard night and she wants … to be left to sleep.’ … But she went in there and that was when I broke down … I think I told them she took off in the early hours of the morning … Took some of her clothes and left in a car.

When his children had gone to school, Hunter said he ‘dug a big hole out the back’ in the garden shed and ‘put a lot of wood and that in it’.

Hunter: I dug the hole about four – maybe five – feet deep, probably as long as this table … Put timber down, paper down, then put her down there, put timber on top – anything and everything I could get … Put petrol in it and set it alight. Let it go all day – kept stoking it … When I ran out of fuel for it, I just filled the hole in and left it there.

He laid a brick floor over his incinerated wife’s secret grave. Hunter said that 12 years later, in 1993, he decided it would be best to move Venda’s remains to a garage he was building.

Hunter: What was left of Venda, I just put under a [concrete] slab in the shed … I just put it [Venda’s remains] in a plastic bag and buried her under the slab … I dug a hole and just put her … planted her … in there, and slabbed her.

At the end of the interview, Hunter with astonishing naivety asked police: ‘My kids aren’t gonna get to know about this, are they?’

Hunter: I don’t really want my kids to know about it. I don’t want it to go in the media. I don’t want it to go anywhere, not past these four walls.

Police: The kids have probably got a right to know what happened to their mother.

Hunter: I can say that to ’em in me own time … I would rather tell my kids.

Shortly after that interview, Hunter did fess up to his three daughters, as well as to his new wife, when they visited him in his police cell. At her father’s murder trial more than a year later, Deborah wept as she recalled the day her dad admitted he was a killer.

Deborah: He told me that he’d killed Mum, that he had hit her with a stick and then cremated her…

Defence barrister Julie Sutherland: Did he say to you that he was sorry that it happened?

Deborah: Yes.

Ms Sutherland: Was he crying when he was telling you what occurred?

Deborah: Yes.

Dianne also cried as she told of her dad’s confession.

Dianne: He told me that he did it … that he murdered Mum … He was very distressed … His first words were: ‘I did it.’ And he was saying ‘sorry’. He just kept repeating himself that he was sorry and told us how much he loved us and we just hugged and cuddled and kissed…

Jennifer: He said that he killed her and he was very sorry. He didn’t mean to do it…

Ms Medley: He said: ‘I have got something to tell you.’ And all I could say was: ‘You did it, didn’t you.’ He said: ‘Yes, I did.’ And he just kept repeating: ‘I am sorry.’

But, while Dennis Hunter admitted killing Venda – and lying for 20 years about it – he denied murdering her. He said it had been self-defence.

Dianne: He basically said that they were fighting and Mum had come at him with a knife and it all just happened from there. He said he had to defend himself…

Jennifer: He told us she was chasing him around the house with a knife and he couldn’t do anything…

Hunter also told police he had been trying to defend himself from an angry, knife-wielding Venda.

Hunter: As usual, we had a blue and she went at me with a knife and I just bloody killed her. I just beat her to death … The kids, they were in bed, it was about two or three in the morning, thereabouts … I think we might have been watching TV or something … I was a shift worker at the SEC at the time … and as I said we were blueing and I killed her…

I don’t know. It’s a long time ago. I just don’t know. I didn’t even know I was going to kill her until it happened … We were arguing about something. I don’t know what it was … Well, I think I went to the loo and when I got back she had a knife then … I just hit her with whatever, I can’t remember what, was near me at the time – just killed her…

The second time she came at me, that was it: I just let her have it…

Police: She had a knife?

Hunter: Yeah. She sort of came towards me with it … I was just bloody petrified, scared, bloody crying … I shit meself, like I always did. How would you like somebody coming at you with a bloody knife? She called me some name. I think I hit her with a stick. Yeah, I think I hit her with a stick. She went down and I think it sort of dazzled her. I didn’t hit her that hard … I think the second time [I hit her] and that was just – that was it.

Police: Did she manage to stab you on this night?

Hunter: Nearly, but I think I got in first.

According to Hunter, Venda’s threatening him with a knife was far from being a surprise.

Hunter: And then she came at me with a knife and that was the last straw because I was sick of her coming at me with a knife. I just couldn’t take any more and the kids couldn’t take any more … There’s been times … I’d even have to shut my bedroom door so I’d know she wasn’t going to kill me because she was always threatening me with a knife, always threatening me life…

[She would] just pick up the knife … Just reckoned she was going to kill me. ‘You bastard,’ she’d say, ‘I just hate you and blah, blah, blah.’ Always on with the hate…

Police: Has anybody ever seen that?

Hunter: There’s only ever been me and the kids there. People don’t realise what goes on between four walls of your life of your family. You love, you like, your wife so much but the last 10 years of our marriage – just wasn’t anything there. I couldn’t afford to move. I just wanted to be with me own kids. I didn’t want her to take my kids because I know she could never have looked after ’em ’cause of the abuse and that, they used to get. David, she hated so bad it wasn’t funny. Anywhere and everywhere I went I was allowed to take David ’cause she just couldn’t stand David being around. I was never allowed to take the girls…

I didn’t want to leave her with the kids. I just hoped to hell she’d up and go. She wouldn’t up and go. She always abused me kids – that used to get on my nerves…

I love my kids so bloody much and they just went through hell and misery – I felt sorry for ’em … [Hunter breaks down weeping.]

Hunter said that for ‘years and years’ he had tried to persuade Venda to get psychiatric help but she had refused, saying he was ‘the idiot’. He admitted to police that at the time he drank a lot of alcohol. He and a mate would sometimes finish off five slabs of beer in a day. Hunter said he told Venda that they both should get help ‘because we got kids, for Pete’s sake’. She eventually agreed to go to see a psychiatrist – but only if Dennis went to see one as well. They let the experts decide which of them had the ‘problem’.

Hunter: I was all right, but we found out she was schizophrenic. And I didn’t know what the hell that was and that freaked me out. I said, ‘Can she be helped?’ then they said, ‘Yeah,’ and I think they put her on valium or something, I don’t know. I just don’t think she wanted to take ’em any more, and I think the last 10 years of our marriage was the worst I ever had…

Police: When you say that on other occasions [when she came at you with a knife] you had just taken off, why didn’t you take off on this night?

Hunter: I don’t know … I think I just got jack of it all at the finish … Always getting the kids abused and bloody bashed, I think it just got to me all at once … I think I just had a gutful of it. I think it was just really pissing me off. I think it was just a spur of the moment. It happened, and I just freaked … It just got the best of me. I just couldn’t handle it any more … I didn’t even know I was going to kill her till it happened and she came at me with a knife and that was the last straw ’cause I was sick of her coming at me with a knife.

After Venda ‘went down like a bag of spuds’, Hunter said he had mixed feelings.

Hunter: At the time I wasn’t happy, [but] I was happy. It was going to relieve me. It was going to relieve me kids. I was just freaking…

Police: Why didn’t you contact police or an ambulance?

Hunter: Dunno. I was scared, petrified.

Police: Of what?

Hunter: I dunno. I didn’t contact police. I didn’t tell anybody … I just kept it to myself.

Police: Do you think you would have been in trouble with the police if you had rung them?

Hunter: Possibly. No doubt.

Police: ‘Possibly’ or ‘No doubt’?

Hunter: I’d say yes.

Police: Why was that?

Hunter: Dunno – ’cause of what I’d done…

Police: What was your reason for killing Venda Hunter?

Hunter: I think I was just sick and tired of the way the kids were getting treated, the way I was getting treated. I don’t know. It just happened.

Hunter was then told he was going to be charged with Venda’s murder, and asked if he had anything to say.

Hunter: No, except that I don’t know how me kids are going to react and I am sorry I done it, but it just happened. It wasn’t meant to, but it did.

I just wish to hell it hadn’t have happened. I just wish to hell she hadn’t have pushed me…

He told the police that even though he hadn’t told his second wife, Vicky, that he had killed Venda he had warned her not to push him too far when they started having a relationship a couple of years after Venda died. Dennis and Vicky’s happy marriage ended when she died of breast cancer in 1993. To help his wife fight the disease, Hunter took voluntary redundancy from the state electricity commission in 1992 – after 24 years.

Hunter: The day I wanted a relationship with Vicky, I said: ‘Vick, don’t ever push me to the extreme. I want to be happy. I just don’t want to be abused or a blue if I dropped that and made that mess …’ you know, and we had a beautiful relationship and I am having another one now…

Hunter’s daughters strongly backed their dad’s claims of Venda’s abuse.

Prosecutor: How did you get on with your mum at the time you moved to Traralgon?

Deborah: I didn’t. I was scared to come home from school because she always … belted into us. We were scared to come home from school in case we copped it again.

Prosecutor: Did you ever tell anybody about what your mother did?

Deborah: We weren’t allowed to tell anyone, not even Dad.

Prosecutor: Why didn’t you tell your father?

Deborah: ’Cause if we did, we would have copped it again from Mum.

Prosecutor: … How did your mother treat Dianne?

Deborah: She did the same to her, just belted her up as well.

Prosecutor: What about David?

Deborah: The same.

Prosecutor: Jennifer was only a baby?

Deborah: She was only a baby, she didn’t cop anything…

Prosecutor: Did your father tell you why he hit your mother [on the night he killed her]?

Deborah: Just to save us from all the beltings that we were getting and so we could have a better life.

Deborah told the trial that a bashing from her mother once left her with a bad cut on her head but that she hadn’t told her teacher the truth about how she got it because at the time Venda was a cleaner at the school. She and Dianne agreed their mother had a Jekyll and Hyde personality: she appeared meek and shy in public, but flew into violent, unexpected rages at home.

Dianne: Mum was very cruel. There was no love, affection. She used to beat us around a lot [but] she was pretty good with Jennifer … I was very scared of Mum. We never could talk to Mum. There was just nothing there…

Once Mum was bathing me … I was five or six … when and – I don’t know what I did wrong, you didn’t have to do anything wrong sometimes – and she just grabbed me by my hair and slammed my head on to the bath tap and she cut above my eye and the scar is still there…

I was told to say [to the doctor and nurses] that I had fallen off the swing … I also wasn’t allowed to tell Dad what had happened. I had to tell him I had fallen off the swing as well…

I remember Dad asked me – when it was just Dad and me on our own – what had happened and I couldn’t tell him and he begged me to tell him, and eventually I did, but I also begged him to please not tell Mum because I knew exactly what would happen. Barrister: Was she particularly vicious to David?

Dianne: Yes.

Barrister: She seemed to dislike him intensely?

Dianne: Yes.

Dianne said Venda would use belts, brooms, dusters, hoses – anything she could lay her hands on – to throw at and beat her children with, particularly David. Even when Venda wasn’t being violent, she was hard to live with.

Dianne: We would be sitting down watching the TV … and she would just call out: ‘One of yous pick the skin off my toes,’ and we used to do that – we were all scared of her. And we used to scratch her head and scratch her back and hold her mouth if she had a toothache and we would be standing there it seemed like hours doing it.

Deborah and Dianne both said that they would often hear their mother talking to herself.

Dianne: It was mainly while she was washing dishes or washing out in the laundry, she would be talking to herself and because we were so scared of her we used to always think she was talking to us and we were always like: ‘Pardon, Mum?’ … because if she called us we basically had to run because if we weren’t there when she wanted us – she didn’t like to call a second time … but she would just be talking to herself and she would always tell us where to go … I know I was very young but I saw my friends’ mums and I knew my mum wasn’t right.

Deborah and Dianne both agreed their father had drunk a lot of alcohol when they were children but said he had been a ‘happy drunk’, a gentle giant. They said that although he had punished them, it had always been for a reason – unlike what they endured from their mother. They also agreed that after Venda’s disappearance, the family had had a relatively peaceful time. They had got on well with their stepmother Vicky, and – after she died – with Norma Medley.

One of David’s childhood friends, neighbour Darren Hilsey, backed the Hunter family’s claims of Venda’s violence, particularly towards her son.

Mr Hilsey: I was actually over there and David and I were just mucking around and he must have been in trouble for something or other, and she [Venda] actually hit him across the head with a broomstick – snapped the broomstick over his head…

Another time, I don’t really know what David had done wrong, but Venda was belting into David in the dining room and, basically, you could hear him being thrown into the wall.

Mr Hilsey also said that when he was around at the Hunters playing with David, Venda Hunter had called his 12-year-old sister a ‘slut’ and a ‘harlot’.

But not everybody thought Venda Hunter was the villain of the 16-year marriage. Yvonne Gentle said the Venda Hunter she had known for many years was ‘very timid, very withdrawn’.

Ms Gentle: She was a simple person. She seemed meek and mild.

Prosecutor: Did you see Venda threaten the children?

Ms Gentle: She was fine with them. I never saw anything untoward.

Prosecutor: How did Dennis Hunter treat his wife?

Ms Gentle: When we first knew them they seemed, well, distant. They didn’t talk a lot but they seemed to get on all right but as the years went by the relationship deteriorated a lot. A lot of the time Dennis ignored Venda, didn’t talk to her … When he spoke to her, it wasn’t very nice. He said things I used to get embarrassed about … Things like: ‘Why don’t you do this like Yvonne does it?’, ‘Why aren’t you dressed like that?’ … I felt embarrassed because I just felt for her feelings because, you know, it was so cruel, I thought.

She said that Venda seldom wore make-up, cooked very simple food and wore very simple clothes. She said she sometimes felt as though Dennis Hunter was flirting with her in front of his wife. This claim was vigorously tackled at the trial by Hunter’s barrister, Julie Sutherland.

Ms Sutherland: In fact it’s nonsense, I suggest to you it’s nonsense about my client flirting with you … He has never flirted with you, madam. What do you say about that?

Ms Gentle: Well, that’s not true.

Ms Sutherland: You were flirting with him and he told you to stop it. That’s the truth, isn’t it?

Ms Gentle: That’s not true.

Venda Hunter’s brother John Holtman said his sister had grown up in an orphanage for ‘underprivileged children’ in Melbourne’s working-class suburb of Sunshine. He said he had largely lost contact with Venda while he fought in Malaya and in Vietnam, and then was posted to Queensland. He said that on a visit to his sister in Mt Beauty in 1970s he had found a ‘feeling of tension’ between his sister and her husband. He said there didn’t appear to be any ‘affection or love’ between the two. He said that he had heard of his sister’s ‘disappearance’ in a letter from Dennis and that he had been ‘tenacious’ in quizzing Dennis about the circumstances of her disappearance – particularly when he came down to Melbourne for David’s funeral. Under cross-examination by Ms Sutherland, Mr Holtman agreed that the ‘orphanage for underprivileged children’ his sister went to was a ‘sort of remedial institution’.

Mr Holtman: She did have some problems associating with reality in her daily life.

The prosecution’s point was that Dennis Hunter’s 20 years of lies showed that his self-defence claim was nonsense – most people who kill while defending themselves call an ambulance or the police after they fatally fell their attacker. They don’t bury them in the backyard. They don’t tell their children their mother has run away in the night. Even those who panic don’t make up lies about seeing the person over the years. They certainly don’t dig up their bones 12 years later, rebury them in a garage and pour concrete over them.

Prosecutor Colin Hillman SC: The accused’s conduct was consistent only with him having murdered Venda Hunter. Why otherwise would he make up the story that he did and continue with that story for such a long, long time? … If Mrs Hunter did come at him with a knife, he killed her under the pretence of self-defence and not in genuine self-defence … It is, I suggest, abundantly clear that he wanted to get rid of Venda Hunter and that the relationship between Venda Hunter and the accused man was one which was as far from a happy marriage as you can get…

By killing Venda Hunter, he got what he wanted: she was gone and he was left with the children. I say that concealing the body overnight; putting the body in the earth floor of the shed; adding paper, wood, petrol; setting it alight; allowing the fire to burn; filling in the hole containing the burnt remains; and bricking over the floor of the shed, all display a consciousness of guilt of murder.

Mr Hillman told the jury that it wasn’t a case of manslaughter, that Hunter had not been provoked into even temporarily losing self-control. He pointed out that after bashing his wife to death, Hunter went outside to smoke a cigarette.

Mr Hillman: This is as clear a case of murder as you can get. Self-defence has been excluded. There is clearly an intention to kill or inflict really serious injury, and provocation is excluded. I suggest you will be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that in fact he did not lose his self-control but rather took advantage of the situation and decided to kill Venda Hunter.

The defence put the spotlight on the victim.

Ms Sutherland: Can I start by saying this about Venda Hunter: there probably weren’t too many people who got a glimpse into the upside-down world that she occupied. There was probably no-one who could even begin to penetrate the unfathomable spaces which her mind occupied.

Was she desperately unhappy? Probably.

Was she a frightening sight to those who did see her in full flight? There would have to be no doubt about that.

Was she scary, unpredictable? Could she fly off the handle into an uncontrollable rage? You have evidence of that before you…

To live with this woman must have been a terrifying ordeal at times – not knowing what you could do and what you couldn’t do, when she would lose it…

He [pointing at Hunter in the dock] hit her to protect himself. Should he have waited until she killed him? He was confronted with an abnormal situation: a person in a rage with a knife. He says: ‘I shit meself. How would you like it, a person coming at you with a knife.’…

Ms Sutherland denied that what Hunter did in the moments – and decades – after killing his wife showed that he had a guilty conscience, that he felt guilty about murdering his wife.

Ms Sutherland: What can you say about his subsequent conduct? It was utterly, utterly macabre … bizarre even, wrong, immoral but, to state the obvious, Mr Hunter is not here, in this court, because he acted immorally, in a macabre fashion or a bizarre way. He is here to face the most serious charge that the state can bring against any individual … that is a charge murder…

He panicked. He freaked.

Then Ms Sutherland carefully approached the issue of provocation. The risk was that by explaining to jurors how they could find Hunter guilty just of manslaughter – because he had been provoked into losing his self-control when he killed his wife – she could undermine her claim that he had been defending himself. She could, of course, have not mentioned the provocation defence, but that would have also been risky. If the jurors were not prepared to let Hunter off completely, if they didn’t accept there was a reasonable possibility he had been defending himself, they might think they had no alternative but to find him guilty of murder.

Ms Sutherland: As to provocation manslaughter. It’s not something I ask you to do … Again, I stress that I am asking you not to … but you may say that what happened here is that he acted under provocation, he acted because he was provoked to the point where he lost self-control.

She ended with a plea to the jury to find Hunter not guilty because he had only killed to defend himself.

Ms Sutherland: What you have before you is, is a peace-loving, ordinary, decent fellow – an ordinary man who was put into an extraordinary situation.

After deliberating for about three and a half hours, the jury announced its verdict in April 2002 – 20 years and six months after Dennis Hunter killed his first wife. As he was declared ‘Not guilty’ of murder, Hunter appeared to relax ever so slightly, his daughters had relieved expressions and the beginnings of smiles, but then came what few were expecting: the jury found Hunter guilty of manslaughter – the charge both the defence and prosecution had all but ignored and had argued against.

Hunter hardly showed any emotion but his daughters cried for their dad. John Holtman was angry for his sister.

At the pre-sentence plea-hearing, the prosecution urged a stern sentence, stressing to Justice Bernard Teague that Hunter had burnt Venda Hunter’s body and hidden his crime for 20 years. The judge was told that in 1981 the maximum term for manslaughter in Victoria was 15 years (it was later raised to 20 years).

Ms Sutherland called for a merciful sentence. She told the judge that Dennis Hunter was 57 and had led a faultless life except for one ‘fateful, regrettable and tragic night almost 21 years ago’. She said given his horrific childhood, it was amazing that Hunter had become such a loving, gentle father.

Ms Sutherland: He tells me that he was tortured by his stepfather … by being stripped naked, tied up to a post and systematically beaten … One of the most vivid memories of his childhood is having spiders thrown at him by his stepfather.

She said that because of his stepfather’s abuse, Dennis was put into a boys’ home from the age of seven to 11. When he was returned home, he ran away and survived in a refuge. She said that despite his horrific start, Hunter eventually managed to get a job at the SEC, where he stayed for 24 years until taking voluntary redundancy in 1992 to care for his cancer-stricken second wife.

Ms Sutherland: You have a peace-loving, even-tempered, wonderful father before you who comes to be sentenced at this time for, really, what was a momentary total loss of control.

In sentencing Hunter on 14 May 2002, Justice Teague noted a sad coincidence – he was the judge who had sentenced David Hunter’s killer, also for manslaughter. The judge noted that as well as his turbulent first marriage, and the deaths of his son and second wife, Hunter had had to cope with an intellectually disabled son. Justice Teague said it was a tribute to Hunter that none of his children had given evidence against him.

Justice Teague: You have clearly cared for your children and that is shown in their loyalty to you.

But the judge told Hunter that what he did after he killed his wife must increase his punishment.

Justice Teague: A covered-up killing can impose a continuing burden on those close to the person who has seemingly just disappeared. The process of grief and closure and the like are suspended…

I take account of the circumstance that your younger children will suffer particularly from the absence of your stabilising influence. Your knowing that will mean your time in prison will not be easily served…

Mr Hunter, I sentence you to seven years’ imprisonment. I fix a nonparole period of four years and six months. The prisoner may be removed.

Outside the court, Mr Holtman had a very different opinion of the man who had killed his sister.

Mr Holtman: How does an ice cube like that walk around watching the children of his second marriage play on the bones of his first wife? How do you do that?

He burnt that body in the backyard and a great pillar of filthy, flesh-infested smoke rose into the atmosphere and nobody even rang the fire brigade.

I have a horrible feeling that if I had not come down there her remains would have laid there until Furlonger Street, Traralgon was levelled for a football field and he would have died with that secret.